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Benjamin Alire Saenz won this year's PEN/Faulkner award for his latest collection of short stories, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. The real-life Kentucky Club is just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, and Saenz joined a reporter there to talk about life in two countries.

Food porn and pirate adventure are two great tastes that taste great together in Eli Brown's Cinnamon and Gunpowder. When a pirate kidnaps a chef to serve her own gustatory pleasures, his creativity is taxed as he prepares feasts — like a Regency-era Iron Chef — using only shipboard supplies.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest, Americanah, follows the trials and tribulations of Ifemelu, a middle-class Nigerian immigrant to America. Reviewer Jennifer Reese calls Americanah a "rich and gloriously detailed tapestry ... hung on the sturdy scaffolding of a sweet love story."

Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah Is Not Obliged recounts the story of a child soldier in Liberia. Author A. Igoni Barrett says in this book, horror and humor become bedfellows, making for a heartbreaking yet laughter-filled read.

Albert Camus' Algerian Chronicles, finally available in translation, collects essays, columns and speeches from the writer's days as a young journalist. Camus was criticized for his moderate approach to the French-Algerian war, but reviewer Jason Farrago says Chronicles is a guide to "how to be just in a difficult world."

A chance encounter with a little girl in an ice cream store inspired R.J. Palacio to write a novel about a boy born with distorted facial features. She says it got her thinking about what it's like to "have to face a world every day that doesn't know how to face you back."

His new book, Dissident Gardens, follows three generations of an activist family, from Rose, a secular Jew and communist, to Sergius, her commune-raised grandson. The book is fiction, but its characters were inspired by Lethem's own family story.

It's been a good summer for author Jhumpa Lahiri. Her new novel, The Lowland, has been nominated for two major literary prizes. But reviewer Ellah Allfrey says that while the book is elegantly structured, she wished for more humanity from the characters.

Stanley Crouch, one of the nation's most prominent jazz critics, is the author of the just-released Kansas City Lightning -- part one of a biography of Charlie "Bird" Parker. Reviewer Craig Morgan Teicher says the story starts a little slowly, but when Parker picks up the saxophone, Crouch's writing cooks.

Claire of the Sea Light is award-winning author Edwidge Danticat's newest work of fiction. She spoke to host Rachel Martin about how experiences of her own childhood in Haiti are reflected in her young protagonist.